When Bob the weaver first appears in News from Nowhere he ‘rubbed his hands with glee’ at the prospect of getting some outdoor work in his friend Dick Hammond’s boat on the Thames. I’m suddenly reminded by this of a curious footnote in the Oxford World Classics edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet. We witness Inspector Lestrade ‘rubbing his hands in a pompous and self-satisfied manner’, on which Owen Dudley Edwards, the editor, comments:
'p.31. rubbing his hands: a gesture one seldom sees nowadays, yet in this story Watson, Lestrade, Gregson all perform it, as do Holmes and various other characters elsewhere’.
Is it really the case that hardly anybody rubs their hands together in this kind of expressive manner any more? If so, when did the practice stop? How on earth would one go about dating the moment of its cessation? If it has indeed died out, what does it mean, culturally speaking, that this has happened? Do we, more generally, have any developed social history of physical gestures? And with News from Nowhere particularly in mind, do we not need a history of gesture in the genre of utopia itself, since the invention of a whole new social system will certainly have ultimately to include the invention of new bodily customs and movements too?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
9 comments:
Corpus analysis of novels would be one way. Google the Internet a second.
From News of the World, 6 March 2010:
Gordon Brown is rubbing his hands. The Tories are useless
The taxman's rubbing his hands in glee
Tax Bulletin |7 January, 2010
The collocational significance is that "rubbing his hands" has strongly negative connotations. It is associated with triumph over an opponent. It might also be associated with other phrases such as "with glee" or "in triumph".
The taxman's rubbing his hands in glee
Tax Bulletin |7 January, 2010
"rubbing his hands", like "set in", appears to occur in strongly negative environments. It is associated with triumph over an opponent. It collocates further with phrases of descriptive gesturing like "with glee".
Jonathan Ross quits BBC, SKY1 rub hands in glee
You should read some evolutionary psychology. The idea that we can develop new gestures in the way you suggest is rather far-fetched. Presumably, you are also implying that in this utopia, we will also be much nicer to each other. Have you read about the failed experiments on the kibbutzim in Israel? How they tried to raise the children communally in the '50s? By the '70s, they has gone back to the regular family system of mothers and their own children.
Thanks for the various comments. The newspaper headlines perhaps suggest that we know that the rubbing of hands is an outdated, excessively histrionic gesture (but also that we still enjoy it), so maybe it now has more literary than actual existence. No doubt I should read more evolutionary psychology! Had we but world enough and time ... But new gestures after all do come into being, and the question then is whether literary utopias can usefully mimic or model or even influence this process. Francis Bacon's 'New Atlantis' would be a good starting point, I suspect. Another blog entry there, perhaps, in due course ...
It would be interesting to see your list of new gestures.
for the two citations, i see different gestures.
hands rubbed in glee are flat palms, fingers up, swift movement - often used of happy expectation
self-satisfied rubs, however, are like moving hand clasps, fingers and thumbs caressing their opposites like filmic villains anticipating new victims [or more mundane hand-washing]
Post a Comment